Waits Plague Transfers of Children to Relatives’ Care

Friday

Jun 27, 2008 at 4:43 AM

A cumbersome legal process can delay transfers of children to caregivers in different states for months, but agreement on how to change the rules is elusive.

HYATTSVILLE, Md. — When child welfare officials in Washington removed five young children from their parents’ home in May, relatives in this Washington suburb quickly stepped in, offering to share guardianship.

The children already spent most weekends at the home of their grandparents, Marion and Gerald Mosley, retired postal workers who were only a 15-minute drive but a world away from the harsh neighborhood where the children lived. The Mosleys took their grandchildren to church choir and other activities and enjoyed watching them climb the trees in their yard. An aunt, a married pediatric nurse, often had her nieces and nephews over to play with her son, and bought a van to haul the extended family around.

If the relatives had lived in Washington, they might have gained custody of the children within days, after a quick check on their suitability. Instead, the children were put in a foster home, where they could remain for months while their relatives wait for Washington and Maryland to make formal requests, home inspections and approvals.

“From the kids’ point of view, it’s like they’re being punished,” said their aunt, Mia Johnson.

Minimizing moves and placing children with a qualified parent or relative are bedrock principles of child welfare. But transferring custody between states, even if, as in this case, it is a short drive across the District of Columbia line, requires a cumbersome legal procedure that lacks the urgency and appeals process accorded placements within a state, and it is under growing attack from specialists in children’s law and welfare.

Each year, thousands of children taken from troubled homes are eventually placed with a parent or close relative in another state, often for eventual adoption. Most of the transfers take months and some take more than a year because of what experts say are outmoded rules.

Such transfers are governed by the little-known Interstate Compact for the Placement of Children. The pact, adopted decades ago as law by every state, was designed to protect foster children from unsafe placements, but it is being challenged by many experts as inflicting unnecessary emotional harm on children, and for not requiring the court oversight that is normal in other custody cases.

Under the pact, the “sending” state, where the children live, must formally ask the “receiving” state to evaluate prospective guardians and visit their homes. Then the receiving state must carry out the evaluation and report back. The pact imposes no deadlines, and overburdened agencies may take months to send the initial request or to make a home visit. And it affords no right of courtroom appeal for the sending state or the relative when a social worker rejects a prospective guardian.

“Kids are unnecessarily remaining in overtaxed foster systems, when there are relatives who are ready and willing to take them immediately,” said Vivek S. Sankaran, a law professor with the Child Advocacy Law Clinic at the University of Michigan.

“Here they have people who love them and care for them,” Ms. Mosley said of her grandchildren. “It really doesn’t make sense.”

“I go to church and friends see the empty seats and ask where the kids are,” she said. “It’s really hurting me.”

It is widely agreed that the pact needs changing, but a fight has broken out over how to do so. The state agencies’ desires to preserve their autonomy appears to be at the heart of the dispute.

The group created by the states to supervise the pact, the American Public Human Services Association, based in Washington, produced a revised version in 2006 that includes calls for “timely” decision making and a commission to make new rules. The revision must be adopted by 35 states to go into effect, and only a handful have approved it.

Jerry Fields, the association’s executive director, said delayed transfers were an urgent problem. But state officials, Mr. Fields said, believed that including a specific timeline in the pact was unwise because conditions change over time. He also said that many states had procedures for administrative appeals.

“The answer is to get the states to ratify the new pact as soon as possible,” Mr. Fields said.

But critics like Mr. Sankaran and a host of children’s law groups say the needed changes should not be left to a commission to regulate but should be written into federal or state laws. State welfare agencies, Mr. Sankaran added, are unlikely on their own to relinquish oversight powers to judges.

A federal law enacted in 2006 would reduce federal aid to states that took more than 60 days to make a home evaluation, and reward them if they did it within 30 days, but the law has not received financing and has had little effect, experts say.

Martin Guggenheim, a legal scholar at the New York University Family Defense Clinic, said the states’ revised version “does not address the basic flaws” of the pact.

When making custody decisions, “you want to get it right,” Professor Guggenheim said.

Experts agree that scrutiny is needed and that some relatives should not receive foster children because of criminal histories, past child abuse, drug use or lack of contact with the child. But a few months’ delay can seem like an eternity to a child.

Long waits and denials to relatives seeking guardianship are frequent. In the 2007 fiscal year, for example, Michigan sent requests to other states to place 563 children. So far, 359 cases have been resolved, with the receiving states taking more than 60 days to complete a home study in 195 of them. In half of the resolved cases, the relatives have been declared unsuitable by the other states. Most denials are presumably for good reason, but, Mr. Sankaran said, “it doesn’t justify the deprivation of due process,” oversight by courts.

Kali Vickery, who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., has been approved by Michigan officials to take custody of her 13-year-old son, who had lived in recent years with his father in Florida. But the process has already taken five months, with the boy in a group home in Florida in the meantime.

The father was jailed on Feb. 1 after warnings about neglecting the boy, who missed weeks of school as the pair moved among motels. Ms. Vickery received a call that same day from the county sheriff’s department saying there was no one to take the boy.

She leaped at the chance, she said, then discovered that the interstate pact had to be satisfied first. But county officials in Florida did not send details of the case to the state office in Tallahassee until April, at which point the state office sent a letter to Michigan requesting a home evaluation. Ms. Vickery was quickly approved.

On June 17, after repeated phone calls to Florida, Ms. Vickery learned that the county had received the approval. But she has been told that Florida’s “change of custody” hearing will not take place until Aug. 14. Her son will have to stay in a group home for another two months.

“I keep hearing about ‘the best interests of the child,’ ” Ms. Vickery said. “This has been just the opposite.”

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